Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 0:05

Welcome to Transacting Value, where we talk about practical applications for personal values when dealing with each other and even within ourselves. Where we foster a podcast listening experience that lets you hear the power of a value system for managing burnout, establishing boundaries and finding belonging. My name is Josh Porthouse, I'm your host and we are your people. This is why values still hold value. This is Transacting Value.

Jim Nichols: 0:34

It's about. All knowledge is good, but really knowing how to discern when you should apply certain sources of knowledge.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 0:44

Welcome to Transacting Value Today. How do we know which facts to believe? From social media to scholastic journals, to teachers and parents, it's hard to know which questions to ask, let alone which answers to believe. Our next contributor says that trust, confidence and consideration are just as important in science as the objectivity of the research. He's a hypereducated veterinarian and scientist and he's the primary investigator for a scientific research business. His name is Jim Nichols and today we're talking our January core values of self-discipline, self-improvement and tenacity. So if you're new to the podcast, welcome, and if you're a continuing listener, welcome back. Folks, without further ado. On Porter, I'm your host and this is Transacting Value, Jim, how you doing.

Jim Nichols: 1:28

I'm doing pretty good. Just a quick clarification I am a postdoc at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 1:35

Okay, and so what is it you do there?

Jim Nichols: 1:38

So I am a postdoc and I am currently doing research in diabetic neuropathy. Basically I look into all neurodegenerative diseases across the board. I've worked on multiple sclerosis, I've worked on several versions of diabetic models and my main focus is neurodegeneration through immune modulation, so immune system attacking the nervous system. So that's kind of my general focus.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 2:02

Okay, before we get into some of why that happens, let's start with who you are, and then we'll get back to that in just a second. So take a couple minutes, talk through who you are, where you're from and what sort of things have shaped your perspective and gotten you into this direction.

Jim Nichols: 2:17

In a broad spectrum. I'm a small town boy. I grew up small town in Lake Wells, Florida. I went to the vet school. I always wanted to be a veterinarian, went to vet school, caught the research bug, went to my PhD at Mississippi State University where I did vet school, and then I met my wife in college. I have a family, two kids. So, broad strokes, I'm a family man, I'm a scientist, I'm a veterinarian and really I am just a scientist trying to keep family life going too. And that's kind of me just in a general sense, very simplistic Enjoy what I do and love coming to work every day and love going home every day.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 2:56

I bet in the Marine Corps we got a lot of jokes about how the majority of our corpsmen are actually unclassically trained veterinarians because they have to work on all of us. But in your case, how do you go from I guess you could say conventionally trained as a veterinarian to now focusing on people or why swap?

Jim Nichols: 3:13

So there's a big push for one health. That's kind of the aspect of it there. Like I said, I always wanted to be a veterinarian. When I was younger and as I was going through school I was learning all about veterinary medicine, all about medicine. I was part of pre-med AMSA, which is the Human Medicine Club for pre-meds, and I kind of always dabbled in both areas, understanding both areas, and then I went to vet school after I had gotten some research experience and caught in the research bug, as I said, and then I kind of wanted to carry veterinary medicine into research, because one of the things I always appreciated about research is that researchers, phds, are very focused on one part of their field and they understand one set of systems very well because they do a deep dive on it. So research is like diving deep into the ocean in one spot, whereas medicine is more like understanding how to navigate the ocean, if that makes sense. So sailors know how to navigate the ocean. They've navigated for thousands of years across the oceans. But if you're a diver that's not necessarily like being a sailor. That makes sense. So researchers do deep dives, whereas veterinarians and medical professionals on the MD side those are people who understand the breadth of knowledge that's been discovered kind of throughout the ages, but maybe not necessarily as deep as a researcher would. So to pair the two together. I got both degrees so that I could pair the two and I would understand what the oceans kind of look like on the surface but then also be able to do deep dives in important areas and know where to do the deep dives. Does that make sense?

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 4:56

Yeah, yeah. Aside from, I guess, more recently, the obvious here with COVID and a bunch of other SARS variants, are you seeing a lot of similarities, and obviously organs and processes and things too. Are you seeing a lot of similarities in your research as a veterinarian to now more your research for humans?

Jim Nichols: 5:14

Yeah, there's tons of similarities. Biological systems across the board are pretty conserved, especially in the mammals. Livers function pretty much the same, kidneys function the same, brain functions the same. There's different variations obviously that make us different, but genetically we're not that different. So on a molecular basis, even the enzymes that we use are used by dogs and cats and rats and mice. That's why there's translatability and why we use mice and pigs and dogs in research. Because there's that translatability of if you do it in this system it also may work in that system and sometimes it doesn't translate. That's why studies sometimes go through those clinical trials and they don't show the same results that we get in mice, because the mice are not exactly one to one people. Obviously there's vast differences, but the differences are not as big as, like you to a tree. Does that make sense? So a lot of things that transfer from horse also transfer over to humans. So my knowledge as a veterinarian really gives me those perspectives of okay, I've seen this system work in about five different species. It should also work over here in humans. And the more I study human medicine on this side of things, because I am dabbling as a researcher in human medicine that allows me to take those deep dyes, as what is true across all species may be good in human medicine. Does that make sense?

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 6:48

Is that kind of the one health concept you brought up earlier?

Jim Nichols: 6:51

Yeah, it really is One health that deals a lot with things like COVID, where it can jump from animals to people, things like influenza viruses, which can jump from animals to humans very easily. Those things are all kind of the one health. A lot of the time it's infectious diseases we think about, but we can also think about just our biological systems in general and our emotions too, Like one health of having a pet in the home may help reduce depression. A lot of these things are just part of that one health perspective of we are starting to get in an environment where dogs and cats and humans and cows start living in closer proximity, and so we need to start considering what is this biome essentially that we're creating that is crossing from humans to animals? That's the one health idea essentially.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 7:40

And this isn't new right, Like hundreds of years ago, people lived in villages with all their livestock and kingdoms with all these other wild animals or whatever applies, and this is sort of just the ebb and flow of that construct right, so we just know better. I'm assuming science has moved some in a few hundred years. So to say that we understand those relationships better or more effectively can make it symbiotic because we know better, I think helps a lot. But when you said also can help mental health, because I'll tell you, the first thing I jumped to Jim was well, like we said earlier, COVID, or like well, being so close to pick a wild animal, you're going to get sick or whatever, especially bacteria and other things. But you mentioned mental health also. And I've got dogs. I feel pretty good when I walk in the door, even if it was a shitty day. So dogs are great.

Jim Nichols: 8:29

They're always happy to see it. They're the best. I'm a dog person, Cats. They're laying on the couch.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 8:37

Yeah, and so there's an extra aspect. I mean you mentioned earlier balancing science and family, and not for the sake of work time and home time. That's not what I'm getting at, but maybe I'm. Maybe I'm just rooted in movies in Hollywood, but I feel like if you spend the majority of your work day or the majority of your professional life as a scientist, you're going to relegate your perspective to harder facts as opposed to, I don't know, more spiritual leaning things, right Values. For example, what role does charisma have in a research lab? I don't know, probably not much if you're reading by yourself, but if you're working on a team, probably quite a bit.

Jim Nichols: 9:15

Yeah, we can get into that actually a little bit, if you want to.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 9:18

Sure yeah. So what's the overlap then between some of those considerations, let's say for values, specifically as you being a human and as you being a more of a factually based, object oriented scientist?

Jim Nichols: 9:30

I think you touched on two distinct things there. One is the spiritual aspect and one is the charisma aspect. But I guess you can say like, on the whole, as scientists, we're more factual leaning, yes, but it doesn't negate the fact that we also have to be humans, right? So some of the best scientists will tend to go more hardcore. So if you think of, if you're a fan of Big Bang Theory, right, you think of Sheldon, who's very like methodical and atypical human behavior, because he's so straight in line with the facts and he's like that doesn't make sense. Yeah, that's not how you get to be in real science, right, because you're still interacting with people. I often tell newer scientists and newer postdocs that one of the hardest things we have to learn how to do is to manage people and become leaders, because we're not classically trained that way. So we get trained in a lot of different procedures and a lot of different techniques and we get to read papers and none of that deals with human emotions, so to speak. But you have to deal with human emotions no matter what you do as a leader. So if you're trying to lead a group of people, you have to understand how emotions are going to play into it and how people, when they get their feelings hurt, or when they are excited or when they want to do something and they're energized, how you're going to take that and you're going to harness it and spin it in such a way that they're going to be productive in the way that they should be. So oftentimes the emotions still play a huge role in what we have to do, and even spirituality because you mentioned that that plays a huge role because we here people of different religions. We have Muslims, christians, we have people who are Jewish, all in our office, like just in this space, and you have to account for that too. You don't get just to divorce your spirituality Personally, I'm a Christian but you don't get to just divorce your spirituality from yourself just to follow the facts. It can happen. I'm not saying that's impossible, that people won't do that, because a lot of people will follow the hard facts almost in a religious sense. You know what I mean Like it becomes a fervor to follow the hard facts, and we see that a lot sometimes in sciences, but it's not necessarily 100% true. So me personally, I like to lead from a perspective of understanding people, understanding how interactions are going to go and really kind of gearing it towards. I understand you're a person, let's lead you in that way and not try and kill you with too much work and just really try and play into your excitement and minimize how much we're going to upset you by doing certain things. So that makes sense.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 12:19

It definitely does, and so let's jump to you for a second. Then, when we're talking about people as people, first, who are you? This is a segment of the show called Developing Character. Developing Character. And so, for anybody new to the show, this is two questions. And, Jim, we explained this a little bit a couple of weeks ago, but just to refresh, these two questions are as in-depth or vulnerable as you want to be, entirely up to you. They're about your value system, all right. So my first question when you were growing up, what were some of the values that you were exposed to or that you sort of aligned with?

Jim Nichols: 12:52

So I think the ones that I aligned with most were not the ones I was constantly exposed to. So I grew up with a bit of a rough crowd and it was almost like I followed a photo negative of what should have been. And it's interesting that when you listen to people talk kind of who are higher end operators, sometimes this is very true of them where they're exposed to environments that force them to choose, and the ones that force to choose and choose values that allow them to escape certain situations are the ones that are hardened in those values. So I think that's where my values come from, is that I had to harden them, and one of my major values is truth, which plays well with me being a scientist. You know it kind of talks about how we chase the truth of scientists, but it really plays into that in that I had to harden myself to always tell the truth 100% of the time, no matter how much it is. I encourage my children to do the same. One of the things I tell them is the truth will always be better than lying and trying to cover it up and somebody finding out later. And so telling the truth is kind of one of my core values and drives me as a person, because I think we talked about this in our previous talk, about how the truth if you can find the truth in a situation, you can move forward. And what I mean by that is, essentially, we build our lives on truth. You know the truth that your wife will never leave you, the truth that your children will always love you, the truth that you're not going to lose your home or that you're not going to get in a car accident. These hopes, these truths that you will always be able to continue forward is how we build our lives. And if you don't accept those things as truth and you don't solidify them, you can't grow, because you have to base on truth and you have to essentially say okay, this is a solid fact, I can stand on, and then I can step forward from that fact. You know, for me personally, the wife thing, the truth for me is my wife loves me deeply and she will never leave me and so I can leave her with my children and I can come to work and seek the truth here. And then, when I find truth here in the science, I can then build a paper on it and I can step forward from that paper into grants. Anytime you find a truth in your life, that's where you move forward from that, and if a truth then becomes untrue, it can really shatter your life. I think one of the best things I ever heard about this kind of dynamic is let's say again you have the wife staying with you. That's your truth. You build that, and then for some reason she leaves you. Just all of a sudden you come home and everything is gone. Your truth is now shattered. You know, your life, the thing you were basing your life on and all your structure on, is gone. There's a hole, and so now everything starts to collapse, and so I think that's one of the things I value most is finding that truth in life. And then I think a lot of people do value truth. Sometimes we get a muddle. If you can find that and always speak to it, it really is a strong thing to put your feet on, to move forward and start getting out of life.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 16:20

You brought up a cool point about truth. I guess I always sort of my natural line of drift when I hear truth is move towards honesty, move towards integrity, not necessarily move towards truth as a noun. And what you just did, as you were explaining, that is, you brought me back to when I got divorced and a lot of that, a lot of what you described is and this is no fault of her own, necessarily but a lot of what you just described is what I was seeing happen while I was packing, while she was packing, while we moved into separate lives in households, and after that she kept saying you're a liar, you broke our family, these types of I'll call them accusations, but they were basically grounded pretty well, I suppose. But she kept saying these things and I didn't know how to respond any other way than defensively or defiantly or some sort of I guess now in hindsight more egotistical or prideful way of rebuttal. But now that you brought up that point, if you take what somebody views as more concrete of a foundation, their truth, their factual baseline, then and they're trying to build from that and you shatter it, well, what else could you be called other than a liar, for example? Now, how you respond to that. Attribution could go any number of ways, but in just the word itself, that's a title that fit me, because that's exactly what I did. Now, it wasn't intentional from the start, right, don't get me wrong. It wasn't a whole setup to spike it down, but it was what it was at face value. So that's a cool point you brought up. But before I get distracted, I do have a second question for you, talking about truth and how things were grounded for you there as you were growing up, through your research, through your life over the last few decades perspective, growing, meeting people, all sorts of inputs what are some of your values now, then?

Jim Nichols: 18:11

I mean that core value of truth is really. It's the one that sticks out to me above all else. I mean from that there's other things that have grown, like always being kind, always doing anything you can to help others. So one of the things I really take pride or not take pride in, but take joy in is if I see someone stopped on the side of the road with a flat tire, I like to stop and help them. I mean it's hard in Houston traffic, but if you can get it, it's a good thing to do, because we as people are all in this together, this together, I mean, as in the human race on the planet. You know, one of the things we always get divided on is like what groups we belong to. You know religious groups, political groups, ideological groups, gender groups, whatever it is you want to lump yourself into, it doesn't matter to me because at the end of the day, you're still a person trying to make your way through this life, and the core values of most people, or the core seeking of most people, is just trying to connect, trying to be safe, trying to find those truths, trying to get through the life that you've been given and succeed at it. And that's the core of most people is trying to succeed and get through this life. And really if you take a moment to stop and do something for someone else to help them succeed, it may take you 10 minutes to do something, to be like, hey, I see you over here, you have these skills. Let me introduce you to my friend over here who needs those skills. That person is now succeeding for the rest of their life because you took 10 minutes to introduce them to somebody. And really, if we can do that more, that's one of the values I find in myself that I enjoy is just doing things for other people, being considerate and being that kind of I have to say, good Christian man of doing things for other, doing things for the community and making sure you're just kind of watching out for other people and just trying to keep people happy, not in the sense that you got to go out of their way to bend the truth, don't do that. But the example that comes to my mind is my wife. Whenever she wants a snack at night, I'm in the kitchen whipping up a snack, because it makes me happy that she gets her snack and she's happy. It's a little thing for me, but for her it is a fantastic thing that I can do for her because she's tired and I gain energy from helping people who are tired, from helping people who have hit a dead end, and I go let me get that wall out of the way for you. Let me do this thing for you so that I can get you to your house with your flat tire. I can get that tire fixed, because you don't know how to fix a tire. Let's get you on your way. I stopped the other day and there was a lady who was sitting there in traffic. She's like I've been sitting here for two hours and the tow truck is two hours away. I'm like do you want me to fix your tire for you? She's like that would be fantastic. We were done in 20 minutes. She was gone right home and I gained that lady two hours of her life for 20 minutes of mine. Like the value of people together and helping each other. It's so powerful to just be like let me help you for 20 minutes and change the way that your day is gonna go, change the way that your week and your year and your life is gonna go For the better. 20 minutes of my time For the better. I mean, that's the thing. Can you do it for the better, and can you do it consistently to where you're helping people around you? That's what I try and do. So that's another core value on top of the truth All right.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 21:43

If folks stay tight, we'll be right back on Transacting Value, empower to promote self-actualization and influence. That should be easy for any authentic and experienced person. Confidence, no problem, spotlight, easy day my ideas in front of people. Wait, what? What if self-empowerment becomes your obstacle? Fear, laziness, control or impatience may creep through anyone. Everyone has a wall and everyone needs an empowerment network, especially media creators. Empower PR Group focuses their niche on nonfiction book authors who want to write a book that sells and to promote that book to those who need it most. It's all about the marketing and the message. Unsure. The next right move Join a public relations group for nonfiction authors that helps your book profit and who helps you gain clarity and grow as a person along the way too. Empower people, empower people. Schedule a 15-minute chat for free to discuss a value-centric approach to add value to your book marketing strategy at EmpowerPRGroup. com today.

Jim Nichols: 22:49

I mean, that's the thing Can you do it for the better and can you do it consistently to where you're helping people around you. That's what I try and do. So, yeah, that's another core value on top of the truth.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 23:02

And in being able to do that there's a certain aspect, I guess, of my job right. So for anybody new, I've spent the majority of my career in the Marines, in the infantry, and a lot of that has been kinetic or combat arms or tactics and strategy and long walks with rifles and backpacks and whatever you attribute that to, you're probably pretty accurate Things like Heartbreak Ridge, but 30 years more modern. Anyway, I guess you could say the aspect of that that really resonates with me now is teaching Marines and sailors how to more effectively communicate, now that's with themselves, and managing maybe regret or guilt and I'm not a therapist, but managing regret or guilt or camaraderie and belonging or socializing with other cultures and working what we call bilateral but team type exercises and events or operations and sort of fostering that similar type of drive and atmosphere to what you just described. And what's really cool is it translates it's not just a department of defense-ism, it's not just a Marine Corps necessity, it's not just a science-based thing and in my opinion it doesn't have necessarily a large what do you call it? Gravitas towards religion, either as an influence, for sure, right, as a correlation for sure, but it's not just where you've got to be religious or you don't help people. You look out for yourself and yourself Not necessarily. I guess we'll take a clarity If we're qualifying in this conversation for now, if we're qualifying religion as a way you view the things you can't understand, or something to stand on when you feel like you can't make sense of something else, you can still be a scientist and understand how things work and why in a more material sense, right. But the cool thing is, 2,000 years ago, the scientists of Pica civilization thought they had the facts too, thought that their truths were correct because they had ways to research that they trusted and come to find out no, actually the sun's in the middle, right. So the truths that we have now, as it applies to science not necessarily spirit are based on what we have at present, right, or, to some degree, what's been passed down historically as well. So how do you, I guess, as a scientist, how do you recommend people way out? Well, how do I know what's true? How do I know what to believe? Whatever I see on YouTube, that's what I read in a book. That's what I hear in a coffee shop, that's what I see on the news. What's your take? How do we balance that. How do we figure out what's the facts, what's the truth?

Jim Nichols: 25:33

Well, I think, if I'm like just being honest right off the top of my head right now, one of the things that just struck me is there might be a slight difference and this is maybe a gray area between knowledge and truth, right? So you said earlier, I use truth as a noun, right, whereas the knowledge we have about the truth. So, if you think of the truth in a sense of like the way that the world actually operates and the way that things actually are, we base our truth on the knowledge that we have, the things we perceive, but the way that the world actually operates we may not actually fully know that, right? So our scientific knowledge may be different. Considered for the, for the sake of this conversation or for anything anybody having a thought about this after listening to the podcast, scientific knowledge may be slightly different from truth. In a sense of, the truth is the way that things actually are and the knowledge we have may not always be a one-to-one with that.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 26:35

Well, because of bias or perceptions or those types of things you're saying.

Jim Nichols: 26:38

Well, just the lack of measurement right, lack of ability to measure the depth, and lack of knowledge about. You know, we haven't traveled to the edges of space. We make measurements and guess about the edges of space, but we don't know because we haven't been there right. So the knowledge we have does not. Things are still happening out there aside from us, but we don't know that truth yet. Our knowledge is the light we've shined on the truth or the perspective we have of the truth. Based on that, we have to then take your question and think about it as to what knowledge should we be trying to seek and how do we verify? Because I think your question was like how do we know what truth to accept and what truth to not accept? Right, and I remember we talked a little bit about getting sources from the internet versus getting it from professionals like me, and I thought a lot on that after our conversation and I think I don't want to decry the internet. The internet is a beautiful place with lots of knowledge and it's lots of great knowledge, but it's you need to be careful in the new knowledge that is coming out. So I think where I wanted to draw the line is if something has been known like diseases, like the black plague or tuberculosis or anything like that. It's been known for decades or even a year. If something's been known for a year or two, go to the internet, know that stuff. Learn that stuff. That's great. Learn how to do carpentry, learn how to do metalwork, learn how to do welding all those things. Learn how to disassemble a gun in the case of the military, learn these things. But if you're talking about specific knowledge for things that are coming out recently, like COVID, where the knowledge is being generated, we have an environment now where we can generate knowledge and the world is exposed to that knowledge bias, I guess, of the sciences, where we find things out and we find out those things were wrong and we're trying to figure out the truth in a rapid succession and people were confused as to why the scientists couldn't get it right. And it's like well, we're learning as it's happening and we're giving you the facts that we know, or the knowledge that we know in the real time, which has probably never happened before in a plague or in a you know pandemic before in history.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 29:07

Artifokes stay tight and we'll be right back on Transacting Value. A great new board game solves any good old boring afternoon or family get together. Games of all kinds involving science, technology, engineering, arts and math as focal points for experiential learning do more than create scientists, technocrats, engineers, artists and mathematicians. Did you know that, with an approximate $44.3 billion industrial-wide investment in social growth and cross-generational learning, toy companies like Vancouver-based Griddly Games, future entrepreneurs, teachers, families and societies have greater chances of success? Creative people who can effectively socialize, responsibly interact and positively impact each other's lives are becoming more important as this hybrid industrial revolution continues to build steam. With Gridley Games, you have an equal opportunity to broaden perspective, increase critical thought and strengthen families, no matter if they're natural, chosen or spontaneously formed. At Gridley Games, we make playtime an unforgettable, meaningful and exciting learning experience. We design our packaging to encourage reusing, recycling, repurposing and reducing, encourage Play, promote exploration and empower self-development in lifelong learning. Come play, explore and Power at GRIDDLYGAMES. COM today.

Jim Nichols: 30:18

And we're giving you the facts that we know, or the knowledge that we know in the real time, which has probably never happened before in a plague or in a pandemic before in history. Things are happening in real time and you get to Google it and look at who's written what paper recently. It's amazing. But that stuff needs to come from professionals and not people who don't know necessarily. And that's not to say like people can't have opinions. When you go to the internet and you're like who am I going to listen to? You might want to listen to the people and this is just a suggestion. You can listen to whoever you want, but you might want to listen to the people who are actually in the lab pipetting the virus into cells and determining how fast they kill the cells. So it's like the people on the ground actually doing the work and trying to get those vaccines out. They're not going to know what we've now designated as the truth of this virus. They're not going to know every single little detail about it. That is how the virus actually operates, but, based on previous knowledge of other viruses, they're going to be able to then determine what is most likely going to occur.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 31:31

And there's a lot of that too. Now, like you said, where, as sort of the commoditized public of this knowledge from the other lens, right where I'm falling, I don't know that, you don't know. I don't necessarily know that it's real time, because my bias, my pattern recognition, tells me you're a scientist. You should know better. How did you not know, how did you not see this coming Right? If all the facts and figures over 50 years were there, why didn't you say something sooner, right? Or how could you be wrong? Because my perception is you're mostly always right. That's a lot of weight on your shoulders too.

Jim Nichols: 32:03

It is and there's a lot of validation that occurs. So there's a lot of things that I don't think gets expressed in the general media, where we're doing statistical analysis which essentially has the 95% confidence interval, which says essentially that 95% of the time this is going to be true. This thing that you've done, you've measured it 95% of the time based on your statistics, this will happen this way and so repeating it, if you repeated 100 times, 5% of the time, things are not going to happen that way in the lab, but we use those to kind of move forward in the science and so oftentimes we'll make half a dozen measurements, but then there's three measurements we forgot to make or we didn't make or we didn't consider yet, and we're going to do those later. But we want to make sure that. I think in the case of the COVID outbreak they were wanting to make sure that people had the knowledge that they had and they risked saying the wrong thing, which science is not. I guess it's not really fully going to be like these are the hard facts forever. It's like these are the things we know based on our stats that are repeating themselves. Does that make sense? How? It's not exactly like saying if you told your kid I'm going to be home every day, and then he was mad when you were late for 30 minutes on like a week, and that's the thing we're talking about. And then people are like, yes, but my anecdotal evidence is I still sick and it's like, yeah, protection, not immunity, not like impossible to get it. So there's a difference and there's a gray area there in the language that was used. But again, there's a high expectation on scientists to have the answer. You guys were trained to get the answers. Why don't you have the answer? And it's like we're doing our best over here. So it kind of seems like we're still like operating on the human scale. Like you guys, there's time involved and, honestly, the rapidity with which they came out with those vaccines was breakneck speed. It was a fast vaccine development. I was super impressed.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 34:11

I think there's some trend maybe not to misappropriate that term given your background but I think there's basically this trend where you know things that people don't know, that people typically don't understand as well as, say, somebody that spent decades studying a particular thing the divers in your analogy earlier, right compared to the sailors, so for not understanding, call it a scientific process as far as how the research works and the testing and the time and the peer review, and then through journals and so on and so on, and so, whatever publication not understanding that process, it's really easy to pass judgment otherwise, because you're the armchair quarterback to the scientists, and so much is essentially, though, what I'd call an irony. You brought up that 95%. What did you call it? 95% was the name Confidence interval. Confidence interval, yeah, 95% confidence interval, and I think, at least in my experience I've traveled the world, I haven't been to Africa and I haven't been to Antarctica, but otherwise I've had operations in all sorts of places and training exercises and what I found so far, and even through the last 100 or so people I've talked to on this podcast, we have all sorts of similar biases and pattern recognition and stances and positions and roots in value systems and other factors, that we all do the same thing. 95%, like any other statistic, may just as well be made up in my analogy right now, but the majority of the time is what I'm going to call it, where I'm only responding to the prompts that I'm receiving from people, based on what I've seen to be effective in the past, until I'm proven otherwise. It's the way I know to respond to people, you know, or it's the way I know how to converse with people, or it's the way I know how to have things in common and build a team and lead a group or anything else in between. I think to understand that one piece alone helps to breed mutual respect, helps to sort of enhance trust and confidence or rapport between I don't want to say different classes, because that doesn't really suit the definition, but the scientists and the doctors and the farmers and the blue collar workers and the different groups of people's identities or whatever labels. I think building that mutual respect helps breed some common understanding and we call it a common sight picture to us, but it's just basically aligning the focal points in your rifle scope, which I think it's a similar circumstance in social sciences. ll folks, sit tight, we will be right back on Transacting Value. I'm sure you've heard that either art mimics life or that music is the conversation style of souls. But if that's true, how do you respond? The Maple Leaf Music Company out of Carthage, missouri, exists to equip students with the power of music and harness their soul drivers to become more effective communicators. Learning a new language, though, is no easy task for anyone involved. At the Maple Leaf Music Company, striving to encourage students to use their skills and talents to make a better community, impact their culture and change the world makes the whole process of language learning way more fulfilling. Vocalizing everything from hopes, dreams and ambitions to wishes, lyrics and reality, children and adults can learn to capitalize on their gifts to share with others through their music. How do souls learn to communicate, build resonance and foster joy and peace? Find out today at the mapleleafmusiccompany. com. I think building that mutual respect helps breed some common understanding, and we call it a common sight picture to us, but it's just basically aligning the focal points in your rifle scope, which I think it's a similar circumstance in social sciences. So, saying that though, for the sake of time, Jim, of all the things you talked about, identity and belonging, and science and fact and research, and the power of communication and teamwork. This may be a loaded question to ask a researcher, but if people want to find out more information about anything we discussed, or even just about the university or oncology or veterinary medicine, however you want to attribute this, where do you recommend people go?

Jim Nichols: 38:11

I want to encourage people, if they're curious about these things, to definitely reach out to me and to reach out to people in the field, send emails. A lot of times people are willing to talk, but the internet is a really great place to just go and find information. It really is. I just caution people to always take the perspectives on the internet with a grain of salt, and I actually want to double back on one thing from the conversation. I know we're limited on time, but it kind of ties the whole idea together, right. So one of the things I think with understanding how people view scientists and I think you kind of hinted to it is we're expected to be right, so let's tie that back to the expectations and the truths that we built our lives on, right. So then, if you're building your expectations and your truth on, you know the scientists are right, but then that truth fails. It's much like the collapse that happened to you with your family dynamic, of that collapse of society trusting scientists. I think that's what happened on a grand scale these past few years. Is this collapse of society's trust on scientists and now they're like I don't know what to build my truth on. Can I trust these guys? Are they going to be accurate? And I'm like, yeah, no, we're still the same people doing the same job 95% of the time. We're going to be pretty accurate, but at least confident. Right, it's reduced confidence. It's that thing where the truth collapsed. And when you're in a leadership position, like scientists are, we're leading the scientific community, you're leading the community of the world in the gathering of knowledge, and then you fail. People are like what are you guys doing? Like you didn't get that right. You're supposed to be right and we're supposed to base our medical knowledge off of you. So it was an interesting perspective from the scientists side to be like that shouldn't have happened. I think people had too high of an expectation on the science that was happening at the time as fact and truth and not as knowledge gathering. That makes sense, yeah managing expectations.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 40:17

I'm sorry to relay that back into the conversation.

Jim Nichols: 40:20

Yeah, so I mean I guess I kind of want to also hint here that, like the knowledge on the internet that you get is fantastic, go to the internet. But also, if you feel like it, you feel like maybe you're questioning the internet knowledge. Cross reference with the scientists. Look up the publications that they're actually citing, look at the facts, get the knowledge, become scientifically literate, know how to read a scientific paper and really dive deep. But you can find so much on the internet. I use the internet every day to look up scientific papers. They're just out there. So I encourage people to get educated for sure.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 40:55

Yeah, and to that point, as a measure of clarity here, when you're saying scientific paper or scientific publication, right, it's not all like what APA styled, pick a topic, pick a research journal. I mean now, everything is rooted essentially in the same degree of research, maybe not depth yet, but the same degree and scope of researching for the sake of validity. You've got media literacy now things, self literacy, sort of like what we're talking through in self help considerations, all the way up to, I mean, that's a cookbook, that's food reviews, there's all sorts of ways to at least gather a little bit of reassurance and then make your own decision about the information. That's part of adulthood. Right, You've got to stand on what you think is true, and not necessarily to subjectively align everything, but for the sake of growth and belonging and identity and confidence. That's sort of the mark of adulthood. I think that's the maturity that comes with the process and, frankly, it may not happen till you're 50. It might happen when you're 20. It's true, you know.

Jim Nichols: 41:56

So yeah, older we get, smarter we get. But it really is about knowing the value of the knowledge and knowing the source of the knowledge. So, like for the cookbook, source, you know that's great and this recipe is great. And knowing the value of the scientific literature and knowing that, like each paper you see put out to one, two or three years to put out, it went through countless review processes. It went through the review of several scientists. Each scientist on that paper reviewed the paper. It is a massive effort to even put out one publication versus a cookbook which can be written and edited by a few people. Oh yeah, not the trivialize it. Well, no, no, no, I mean it's to say that all knowledge is fantastic. I deeply encourage anybody to get any kind of knowledge that they want, but then also knowing what goes into each set of knowledge like I would go to Gordon Ramsay for cooking, I wouldn't go to me. So the value and the source of each knowledge, each fact that you find, or it of knowledge that you find, like really being discerning about where that's coming from, and not just like a 10 minute YouTube video about the pandemic and how that could have been done better from content creators. It's really gathering all the facts and then being like how do I feel about this? These facts are accumulated. It's about all knowledge is good, but really knowing how to discern when you should apply certain sources of knowledge.

Joshua "Porter" Porthouse: 43:25

Something sounds solid, dude. Yeah, I couldn't have tied it up any better. That was perfect. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, they can drop a message on our website and I'll forward it to you. Well, listen, I really appreciate it. I know you got to get back to work Actually, I do too, for that matter so thank you for your time. I appreciate you coming in a little bit early and just talking and having this conversation and talking about our core values for this month even a self improvement and self discipline and tenacity, and working through a lot of these topics with us and clarifying them. I really appreciate the opportunity, man, thanks, yeah, it's been great, thank you. Thank you to our show partners and folks. Thank you for tuning in and appreciating our value as we all grow through life together. To check out our other conversations, merchandise or even to contribute through feedback, follows, time, money or talent and let us know what you think of the show. Please reach out on our website, transactingvaluepodcast. com. We stream new episodes every Monday at 9am Eastern Standard Time through all of your favorite podcasting platforms and we'll meet you there. Until next time. That was Transacting Value.